


Wings

by ThlayliOfTheLeaves



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst/fluff ice cream, Cora is evil, F/M, Family stuffs with Bae and Rumple, People can fly, People have wings, Romance, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-04-28 23:46:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5109884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThlayliOfTheLeaves/pseuds/ThlayliOfTheLeaves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Belle's wings have always given her freedom. But when her father makes a careless deal with Cora, a witch who has the Dark One enslaved by the power of a dagger Belle finds herself wingless and afraid, trapped and at the mercy of a sorcerer who might not be as dark as he seems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Amidst an ocean of darkness

_‘Are you sure you’re happy with this deal?’ Cora asks Lord Maurice. ‘I save your little town in exchange for the most precious thing in this room?’_

_‘I am.’ Maurice says, looking round at the numerous jewels that adorn the walls. The absence of one of them could not be too damaging, surely, when in exchange his people were being saved. From the shadows of the wardrobe she is hiding behind, Belle’s wings flutter behind her in anticipation._

_The Imperial Empress removes a silvery dagger from the sleeve of her dress. The dagger of the Dark One has been possessed by the Empress for decades and allows her to rule all of the Enchanted Forest with an iron hand. There is a name on the dagger, but though almost every person of noble birth in the Enchanted Forest have seen the Dark One in person (Belle herself included – though the cage in Cora’s great hall that he occupies always makes her shiver in disgust), no one but Cora knows his name._

_‘Dark One,’ the woman says, her deep red wings fully spread out behind her, each feather perfect and adding to the air of authority that hangs heavy around her. ‘Dark One, as your mistress I command you to rid the kingdom of Avonlea of all Ogres and to eliminate the threat for another hundred years.’_

_Belle trembles slightly at the rush of magic that fills the room and floods her lands, the great power that comes from far away, and she feels an almost physical blow of guilt at the thought of the Dark One, kept like an animal and forced into slavery helping Cora gain more and more power._

But it’s for the greater good _, she tries to console herself._ Thousands of lives have been saved today.

_Cora turns to her father. ‘And now for my price.’ She says coolly, without emotion. ‘The most precious thing in this room.’_

_And she turns towards where Belle is hidden._

 

_\---_

Cora takes her to the castle in a rush of scarlet smoke that tastes like blood. Belle struggles, of course; but fighting Cora’s magic combined with the bodyguards who hold her down the moment they appear in the Imperial Castle’s Great Hall is impossible and ends as soon as it begins.

Now she is bound to a table surrounded by clerics, Cora standing at her head and two other men wearing hoods the colour of poppies, wielding knives that practically bleed magic standing at her side.

‘Some of the most precious spell ingredients ever,’ Cora says, ‘are the feathers and wings of an untouched girl – the people here will pay me a great deal for even a feather from your wings. Your father should have been more careful, my dear. Or perhaps it is you who should have taken care and stayed away.’

Tears flow freely down Belle’s face though she swore she would be strong, dripping into the ragged bodice of her dress which was torn in the struggle to free herself from the hands that tied her down. For now, she is relieved they haven’t done worse – but then, Cora needs her untouched, for now.

If she twists her neck painfully, she can see the cage at the end of the room, just behind the throne where Cora sits at formal dinners. It looks like a cave, hollowed out of the solid rock behind the pristine white walls of the hall. The bars on the front glisten white, too, but from then on there is only darkness. Belle remembers sitting at the table many times, trying desperately to eat something when in reality all her appetite had fled at the thought of the monster-man in a cage barely a few steps away. He would always sit silent in front of the bars, hands fiddling with a thin strand of straw, though she doubts whether this submissive display was voluntary.

Now the Dark One stands slightly back, face half-hidden in darkness, the silhouette of his immense black wings stretching out behind him. His movements are restricted by the chains that enshroud him like a kind of decoration, but he paces back and forth, large dark eyes occasionally darting to hers; what she can see of his expression is strange, almost otherworldly, almost longing, and yet more comforting than the cold mercilessness of the others – the ones that say they are human.

Her back is exposed, and she only has time to catch the glint of lilac-tinted knives flashing at the corners of her eyes before an unimaginable pain explodes just below her shoulders.

The men use the knives to saw at the base of her wings, digging into her back. Within seconds, the pain is so great she blacks out.

The pristine white room comes back into focus somewhat as they drag her off the table. There is a gaping hole in her existence which tears wide as she tries to move her wings, to struggle free, and she finds that there is nothing to move. Her back is slick with blood, her gown saturated in it. She can _feel_ it, the loss, a ghost that hovers behind her.

‘Dark One,’ the High Empress says behind her, ‘preserve these wings in my safe.’

There is a distant growling.

‘Do I need to tell you twice, dear?’ Cora asks in a voice which would freeze the deserts of Agrabah.

There is a short pause, that by-now-familiar feel of magic rippling in the air.

Cora turns to the clerics standing round her. ‘I needed her untouched for the wings,' she says, 'but she is yours now; if she is still alive at the end I will sell her to the highest bidder.’ She smiles analytically at Belle. ‘You’re a fine young woman. You may be of worth to me yet.’

Belle’s tears mingle with her blood, and the hall echoes with her screams.

 

 ---

 

‘Give her to me!’ the Dark One screams. ‘I want her, I need her! Give her to me!’ his arms try to reach through the bars, but are hindered by their chains. They shake the cage with a frightening power and Belle, who feels that by now she nothing more than a limp doll kept alive by some twisted curse, looks at him with only a half-aware gaze. The holy men have torn the top of her beautiful dress – more red than gold now – leaving her completely exposed. His eyes, inhumanly large, dart with frenzied desperation from Cora to Belle.

‘Oh my little slave.’ Cora murmurs, stepping closer to the bars and extending one long, pale finger to stroke his cheek. ‘You’re truly desperate to have her, aren’t you?’

‘I need her.’ He repeats, and Belle shudders at the keening air that his voice takes. ‘Give her to me.’

‘Ask nicely,’ Cora says. The attention of the clerics is no longer on Belle, and she tries to rearrange her ruined dress to cover herself, curling up into a ball and wrapping her arms tightly around her knees, as though it would undo anything that had been done. The deep cuts dug into her back are still bleeding, sluggish and slow now, but the least amount of movement will open them back up.

The Dark One’s gaze lingers on her before flitting back to Cora. ‘Please.’ He says through gritted teeth. ‘Please give her to me.’

‘You want this useless woman?’ Cora asks with disdain. ‘This fallen girl? What more can you do but defile her further?’

He seems to think on it for a second. ‘I _need_ her.’ He says. Cora laughs at him.

‘Oh my poor mad Dark One,’ Cora says, ‘I shall indulge you just this once. I am kind to all creatures, even you.’

The Dark One’s expression barely changes but a pulse of anger seems to beat through the room. ‘I want her give her to me please _now_.’ He says, and his voice, quiet this time, is as sharp and grating as the knives the clerics used to take Belle’s wings. The power behind it is too great, she thinks, to be contained within a cave and a few bars.

Cora makes a slight beckoning motion and Belle is dragged over to the bars of the Dark One’s cage by a current of magic. She stumbles and is caught by what seems to be thin air. Cora has magic of her own.

Belle hangs like a puppet in the air, head lolling to the side; she closes her eyes, hoping that with darkness will come unconsciousness, and with unconsciousness will come death. Grabbing her hands, which are still holding her dress in place, Cora forces her wrists behind her and conjures a rope to tie them together, leaving her helpless.

‘Look at him,’ Cora hisses, grabbing a fistful of Belle’s hair and forcing her head round to face the Dark One. ‘Your father’s idiocy has given you to a monster.’

Behind her, she senses the eyes of everyone in the room gazing at her hungrily, and she can still feel the endless trickle of blood down her back.

‘You are the greatest monster here,’ she whispers, and had she the energy, she would be somewhat gratified by the angry flutter of Cora’s wings.

‘She is yours,’ Cora spits at the Dark One. ‘You may keep her alive as long as you wish – when you get tired of playing with her, you can kill her.’

‘Deal,’ he says in a muted voice and another thrumming beat of magic pulses through the air.

A cloud of Cora’s blood-smelling smoke envelops Belle and her perspective on the surroundings shifts as she finds herself standing on rough, uneven stones instead of polished white tiles. With the magic that was supporting her gone, there is nothing to hold her upright and she collapses, lurching towards the floor.

Two hands catch her: she feels the immense power behind them and tries to fight, the feeling of yet another man about to touch her in ways she does not want to be touched making her sick. She is too weak to scream but not to whimper pitifully as she comes face to face with the Dark One without bars to separate them.

His inhuman face studies hers for a moment, and she closes her eyes and tries to turn away, dreading the next few minutes, hours, days – however long he keeps her alive, however long he plays with her. Cat and mouse, she thinks.

The seconds drag by, the hands that hold her radiating heat. They feel strange, different from a normal person’s, but she can’t focus on why, can’t for fear, for pain, for dread.

Something brushes her cheek; and in that moment, she thinks it is the softest thing in the world – a wingtip, delicate as her own used to be and yet infinitely stronger than any human wing.

His hands move away, and the soft feeling of thousands of feathers sliding over her back makes her relax slightly and instinctively open her eyes again.

One of the Dark One’s huge night-black wings supports her, and he gazes at her with something unfathomable in his eyes, something almost fearful. His dark eyes are up close a strange mix of reptilian and feline, and resolutely remain fixed on her face instead of straying to her torn bodice. A hand supports her head and taking intricate care, he reaches to take the corner of his other wing in the other hand and gently lays it over her like a blanket, like an attempt to preserve her dignity though there is nothing of it left.

‘What are you doing, beast?’ Cora’s voice slices through the still air and Belle’s terror returns. Almost too exhausted to cry, a single tear meanders down her cheek and drops onto the hand of the sorcerer to who can end her life on a whim.

The others, the ones beyond the bars, laughed at her when she cried and screamed and begged, but he – the creature that is hailed across the realm as the darkest being known to man – freezes completely as the tear hits his strange skin. For a few moments, he seems to cease even to breathe, and she tries to curl up in the shelter of his wings, to prepare herself for the laughter that is sure to follow.

‘Hush,’ she hears him say in a soft whisper, and she feels herself being rocked backwards and forwards like a young child. ‘Hush…’

From the other side of the bars, there is derisive laughter. ‘Pet,’ Cora says, her voice acidic in its sweetness, ‘do you think she could ever find comfort in a monster like you?’

The Dark One tears his gaze away from Belle to face Cora, and Belle follows suit. The woman is standing at the bars, unable to hide her shock behind a mask of sneering indifference.

The supposed monster to whom she is referring stiffens still more at the taunt and stops rocking Belle, who lets out a small involuntary moan at the loss of the comforting sensation. In an instant, Cora seems somehow forgotten as he fusses with the wing that blankets his prisoner, adjusting is needlessly, tucking it under the other wing. Pointedly, he turns away from Cora and the others, shuffling over to the darkest corner of the cave, where half-hidden in a twilight of flickering shadows there lies a spinning wheel, the floor around it carpeted in straw and glimmering golden thread. From her nest in the warmth of his wings, Belle watches as he scoops the straw into one large pile and with the gentleness of a man handling an almost-shattered glass, he lays her on it, kneeling between her and the roving eyes of the guests assembled beyond the bars. She curls inwards towards the wall, hands still tied behind her back, trying to hide herself from him, from all of them.

A hand catches her bound arms and begins to untie the rough rope that has already cut into her wrists. The freezing metal of his chains brushes against her hand, getting in the way, and he snarls in frustration and distantly she can hear that whenever he moves, a discordant lullaby of clanking chains follows him like an unwanted ghost.

He manages to untie the rope, and she sighs in thankfulness, wrapping her arms around her chest.

‘I’m sorry, pet,’ Cora says, spitting the degrading term out in the same sugary tone that she used earlier, ‘but apparently I’ve been misled as to your true intentions for the broken toy you have there.’ Belle hears metal against metal and cringes away from the sound, by now recognising it as the Dark One’s dagger being pulled from its sheath. Above her, the Dark One shudders violently as though the sound were death itself.

‘I want the girl back. Now.’

The Dark One, kneeling almost protectively over Belle, does not move. Belle imagines Cora’s hand tightening on the dagger. ‘Dark One, I command thee to bring me lady Belle of Avonlea. Immediately.’

Belle’s heart thuds in anticipation of a magical smoke cloud which will whisk her away from her bed of gold and straw to face Cora’s fury, but still the Dark One doesn’t move.

‘I don’t understand,’ Cora says, almost hysterical at the failure of her command. ‘Why isn’t it doing anything?’

‘Deals,’ Belle hears the Dark One whisper above her. ‘We made a deal. A please for a girl, a please for a girl, a plea for a child…’

Cora is silent for a while, and Belle wonders what he could mean. _A plea for a child._

‘You tricked me.’ Cora says, her tone sucked dry of all sweetness. ‘You tricked me into the only thing powerful enough to override the command of the dagger; one of your infernal deals.’

‘Tricked, tricked,’ the Dark One sings under his breath. ‘What does it matter? The deal is struck.’

Cora utters a small shriek of anger. ‘It would appear that the evening’s entertainment is over.’ She says to the guests. ‘Get out. All of you.’

The thud of wingbeats sends a light breeze through the cage, making Belle shiver.

‘I warn you, Dark One,’ Cora rattles the bars of the cage. ‘Remember who is in control.’

Scarlet smoke diluted of its magic drifts over to Belle, who retches slightly at its metallic taste.

They are alone. Whether this is a relief or a blessing, she can’t quite tell, though the Dark One has so far shown no inclination of hurting her. Perhaps he was simply waiting for Cora to leave.

The coarse sound of ripping fabric forces a scream from Belle, and his sharp gasp makes her turn to look at him. His hands are frozen on the torn fabric of his rose-red shirt, which he has ripped open. Though her entire body is afire with pain, she frantically tries to scramble away from the Dark One (the memory of hands tearing at her dress still far too fresh in her mind). Her fears about him were right, and oh she was such a fool to hope, hope that his protective motions in Cora’s presence meant that he might not hurt her.

As though released from a spell, his hands jerk into motion, frantically fluttering over her, a frown deepening on his oddly-coloured face.

‘No no no no no…’ he says, hands still trapped in their odd dance, not quite touching her. ‘Please don’t, please don’t be afraid.’ He scuttles backwards behind the spinning wheel, peering at her through the spokes like a frightened animal.

Belle collapses back on the bed of straw, but her attempt at movement has made her body burn even more and she can feel slow drops of blood slipping down her back into her skirt and the world goes fuzzy at the edges.

The haze expands, obscuring her vision from the edges inwards like a pond freezing over, and Belle knows that there’s nothing she can do to stay awake, to keep him from abusing her whilst she is unconscious. She is completely at the mercy of this man – if he is even that.

Her last thought is that perhaps, if she is lucky, she won’t wake up.


	2. A Flicker of Light

Rumplestiltskin huddles into the circle of his wings and looks at the girl – Lady Belle – and wonders how something so perfect can possibly have found its way into his cage.

She is sleeping or unconscious, but not dead; he knows she is alive because he felt her warm breath on his hand when he dressed her in his red shirt a little while ago.

The shirt was once a flamboyant, ornate thing, but years of imprisonment have turned it into something of a filthy rag. He is ashamed of its dirtiness, hates to see it touching her, pure and delicate as she is (just as he hates to see his hands, the hands of a monster, touch her flawless human skin) but he thinks that perhaps she would prefer this small offering of modesty than lying unclothed in the straw.

Her blood still spatters the white floor, and he can almost see the ghost of her wings lying lifeless there, can almost hear her sobs. Turning back to Belle, he observes not for the first time how small she is without the added bulk of her wings, and how pale she is. Looking at her, he worries that she’ll die from blood loss – he knows from bitter experience that those with no reason to live are much less likely to wake from a serious injury.

‘She doesn’t look very healthy, does she?’ Cora asks behind him and he spins round, growling like the feral beast he is. She likes doing this, interrupting him, coming here when she is angry so that she can mock him.

‘Now now, Rumple, there’s no need to get excited. Come here.’

Forced by the dagger to stand and trudge over to the witch woman, he unwillingly turns his back on Belle. Cora reaches up and with one scarlet-nailed hand and brushes his cheek. He bats her hand away.

‘Stay still,’ she says placidly, slapping his face hard.

He can’t move away. ‘Why are you here?’ He asks.

‘Why, my dear, to talk to you of course. I haven’t seen you so focused in years. This is the real you, not that mad screaming imp I’m usually forced to deal with. Funny…’ she runs her long fingers through his hair and if the dagger wasn’t keeping him there, he’d shy away and if there were a stream or pond or ocean in his cage, he’d wash off the feel of her, grate off every inch of skin she ever touched.

‘Funny how this broken slip of a thing can bring you back from the depths of madness,’ Cora muses. ‘It would be interesting to see whether you stay sane when she’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ he whispers, desperately trying to turn back to Belle, to see that she hasn’t been further harmed.

‘Well, you might not need food or water to survive, but she’s human and she very definitely does.’ Cora says. ‘And judging by the state she’s in, she needs it soon if she’s going to last the night.’

Rumplestiltskin’s eyes dart to the heavy curtains that obscure the windows. He has had no way to track the time of day for years. It's something Cora often does; taunt him with the knowledge that it is either day or night when he has no way of knowing whether it is truth or lie.

‘I know now that you want her to survive – whether for entirely innocent reasons, I can’t tell.’ Cora continues. ‘But you’re a useless slave stripped of your power and left to rot in a filthy cell. Without my help, she’ll bleed or starve to death.’

He growls in acknowledgement that what she says is true.

‘So I’ll make you a deal.’ Cora says.

‘For a deal to be struck, two people must each have something the other wants.’ Rumplestiltskin says carefully. ‘You know what I want. What do you want?’

Cora’s answering smile spills, blood red, over her snow white cheeks.

 

\---

 

‘Belle, Belle,’ someone says urgently. ‘Belle.’

She opens her eyes, half-conscious. A blurry, greyish-green face hovers above her, tendrils of curly hair brushing her face. Something nudges her lips – the edge of a wooden bowl.

‘Drink this.’ He murmurs. ‘Please.’

She obliging opens her mouth. A disgusting, metallic liquid slithers down her throat.

‘Urgh!’ She twists to one side and retches. ‘What is that?’

‘Please just drink it,’ the voice urges anxiously, and Belle finds she can’t seem to resist it, as a hand tilts her head back and she swallows the rest of the liquid with noises of disgust.

‘Thank you,’ the voice says as she drifts back into sleep.

Frowning to herself, she can’t help but think that the thanks is the wrong way round.

 

The next time she wakes, it is of her own accord – or rather, the fault of the blazing pain in her shoulders. She recalls dimly waking previously in a half-delirious state, but this wakefulness has no such mercy and the world and her memory return, both with acute sharpness.

Everything comes back to her; how she hid in her father’s throne room, how Cora sawed off her wings and gave her to those corrupted people before gifting her to the Dark One to use or kill as he wished. She remembers him cradling her gently, sheltering her with his wings, untying the rope Cora bound her with.

And the ripping noise as he tore the dress shirt he was wearing.

What were the motives behind his actions? The actions themselves were, Belle thinks, utterly confusing. He was so protective, yet he had every right to be angry with her – after all, her father used him to save her people.

There is a horrible taste in her mouth, which is also bone-dry. It must have been the Dark One, too, who fed her that disgusting stuff. Part of her would like to say that it was poison, but she feels suspiciously better than she did when she lost consciousness. The pain across her back is still intense, but not as bad as it used to be, and she can feel almost no pain from the rest of her body where Cora and the others abused her, save for a stiff empty soreness somewhere near her stomach.

As an experiment, Belle uncurls slightly from the protective cramped position she must have unconsciously slipped into, before remembering that the front of her dress is little more than a torn dishcloth. Worried about what the Dark One might have done while she was vulnerable, she lifts a hand to her bare chest, somewhat in anticipation of more bruises, only to find that she is wearing a dark red dress shirt. Beneath the shirt, she can feel a stiff line of bandages covering almost her entire torso, stretching like a second skin over the wounds on her back. The bloody remains of her bodice and corset have been cut away, leaving only the skirt.

It only takes her a second to connect this to the Dark One and she pushes herself up on her elbows though it feels like hell.

Half camouflaged into the rocky cell wall diagonally opposite her, a shirtless Dark One shrouded by his wings in a cloak of midnight watches her silently with an unblinking stare. Belle jumps a bit, and curses herself for being so skittish.

Without the shirt and its high collar, she can see the numerous lacerations on his body, mostly from the chains, but some not. His grey-green skin has a bruised purplish undertone, and she can identify a series of still-bleeding wounds across his shoulders as the distinctive marks of the notorious Cat-‘o’-nine-tails whip. Remembering his previous respect towards her privacy, she averts her eyes to his face, where another bruise is flowering on his right cheek.

He nibbles his lower lip as he watches her watching him.

‘The shirt…’ she begins, meaning to express her debt of gratitude or at least thank him.

‘It’s no matter,’ he cuts her off immediately. ‘I’m sorry it’s so filthy.’ He actually looks ashamed of himself.

Belle takes a deep breath and wonders what to say, but pain shoots through her abdomen and she starts coughing, collapsing back onto the straw. The Dark One moves so fast that for all the world it looks like he teleported by her side, only without the cloud of multi-coloured smoke Cora always uses. His hands hover in the air, twitching undecidedly and settling into the motions of their regular flutter-dance before settling on helping her up to lean against the wall. Even as he expertly manoeuvres her into a sitting position, he seems to touch her as little as possible.

He scurries over to another corner and brings back a waterskin. ‘Drink this,’ he says urgently, holding it to her lips.

The feeling of clean, fresh (though lukewarm) water filling her dry mouth tastes like heaven and she gasps a thanks. He makes a dismissive hand gesture.

'What did you give me, earlier?' She asks. 'It seems to be healing me.'

He looks down sheepishly. 'It was blood. My blood.' His hands twist around one another and his eyes are downcast as though waiting for her scream of revulsion. The silence stretches on and he tries to fill it. 'It has magical healing properties and you were on the verge of death so...' His voice fades. The memory of the liquid sliding down her throat makes her want to be sick but she hastily pushes it down.

‘I assume,’ she ventures nervously, ‘that judging by this whole lending-me-your-shirt thing you’re not going to… assault me in any way.’

A flash of panic springs into his eyes, followed by an immensely sad look which settles there like silt at the bottom of a lake.

‘That was never my intention,’ he whispers. ‘I would say I am a monster in many ways, but that is not one of them.’

Embarrassed, she flushes. ‘I-I didn’t mean-’ she trails off. What didn’t she mean? That she assumed he’d be like the others? That she assumed he’d be worse, simply because he looked somewhat disconcerting? On close inspection, his skin is slightly scaly, adding to the reptilian look his eyes give him. It’s disquieting, but not disgusting.

He looks down and fiddles with a piece of gravel on the floor, tapping the heel of his boot in the dust.

‘I’m sorry.’ She says sincerely. ‘I… was scared. I still am.’

‘I promise I won’t do anything.’ He says. ‘Never, not ever. Never.’

Her words on the subject seem to have untethered some kind of cord that keeps his mind tied down, and she can feel a strange madness trying to drag him away. So she does the first thing that comes to mind; she reaches out and grabs one of his hands as it repeats its waltzing pattern on the floor.

She couldn’t have gotten more of a reaction if she’d electrocuted him. He flinches so hard that his hand is almost wrenched out of her grasp, and those sad eyes of his go so wide she can see the whites that surround his overlarge irises.

Okay, it looks like hand-holding is too much too soon. Belle deliberates, searching for a topic of conversation. She’s never been very good at making friends, but then, the situation has never been quite so fascinating or as dire as this one.

‘Do you like reading?’ A good starter question, she thinks. Reading takes you to a realm, to a life, different from your own. It’s a safe question.

From behind that shocked expression shines a glimmer of curiosity. ‘I – I don’t have much in the way of reading material.’ He stammers.

Cursing herself for being so stupid, Belle blushes. Of course decades holed up in this cell didn’t include an extensive library.

‘I used to love it, though,’ he continues, looking not at her but at something far away, caught at the edge of his memory. ‘I read… all the time. One of the benefits of immortality – time to waste and all that. And I used to read to Bae.’

Something, a darkness, shifts suddenly over his face and he becomes closed off, turning his face away from her, its features shifting into a sneer or grimace (in the half-light she can’t quite tell which). The inferno of intrigue within Belle roars at her to ask him who Bae was, or is, but she forces it down, knowing that it would be several steps too far.

There are a few minutes of silence, and she’s tempted to leave him to his private thoughts, though it makes her uncomfortable. But when she looks at him, she sees the orbs of his eyes glassy with tears, pinpricked with little flickers of light like a starry sky. This, more than any curiosity or practicality, is what makes her speak again. To ask a question now would be invasive, so she decides to tell him about herself. Safe, impersonal subjects.

‘I adore reading.’ She says. ‘When I was a little girl, I used to curl up by the fire in the library, accompanied by a basket of apples, and I’d read all day. The books kept me company.’

She looks at him, trying to catch his response, but he is turned away.

‘And…’ she thinks for a moment. ‘There was this scarf that my mother made me, and it was far too long and every time I wore it in front of the fire it was much too warm, but I wore it anyway. And Petrichor would always like to curl up in it… I’d stroke her while I read.’

‘Petrichor?’ He asks, and though he sounds disinterested and unfeeling, Belle can hear the harsh note that tears have left in his voice.

‘My cat,’ Belle explains. ‘You know the smell after rain, when you can’t quite place it but it smells like the earth and sky colliding? That’s petrichor. When I read and it was raining, I’d always have the windows closed but as soon as it stopped I’d run over and open them to smell the air. It’s my second-favourite smell, behind New Book Smell.’ She's talking complete rubbish; why on earth would he want to hear about her favourite smells? She is about to apologise when, to her surprise, he speaks.

‘You could hardly call a cat “New-Book-Smell”’ he observes.

‘I don’t suppose that would be very practical,’ she says with a slight smile and makes sure that she remembers that even the most mundane things can sometimes draw someone out of their shell.

‘We had a cat.’ He says.

‘Oh?’ She says, but he doesn’t offer anything more on the subject. They sit in silence for a little while longer, and she’s trying to think of what to say next.

There’s a heaviness about her movements and thoughts, an exhaustion that’s already setting in even though she can’t have been awake more than thirty minutes. Whether it is blood loss or the need to forget what has happened to her, sleep is reaching for her with greedy arms.

It’s chilly in the massive hall, and she shivers, instinctively moving the muscles that will draw her wings closer to her so that she can use them as a blanket.

The empty coldness where her wings should be resounds through her like a physical blow and she whimpers, letting tears slide down her cheeks for the first time since she woke up. Soon the silent tears turn into ugly sobs, and her whole body, maimed and broken, shakes as she hugs herself, gripping handfuls of the fabric of the Dark One’s shirt. It is silky beneath her fingers but stiff with dried blood, which only makes her dissolve further into tears.

‘B-B-B-Belle?’ She hears him moan. ‘Belle?’

The floor is suddenly ice-cold as she slides down the wall to lie there, crying into the sleeves of her – his – shirt.

‘Do you need anything?’ He stammers. ‘Anything…’

She almost wails at this offer, which in any other situation would be kind but is now a knife twisting in her wound. What she wants is to go back in time to the deal, and stop her father unwittingly bartering her life away. What she wants is to have her dignity back, to want the feeling of human touch as opposed to shrinking away from it.

What she wants most is her wings.


	3. Alone

She wakes screaming.

Rumplestiltskin, who has moved closer to her and is now leaning against the spinning wheel, watching her, jerks upright and looks around panicked as she screams and flails at the air.

‘Belle, it’s okay,’ he says. For a moment he hovers, then reaches out a hand to touch her arm.  
The moment his fingers touch her skin, she screams and leaps away from him, staggering across the cage. ‘No!’ she shouts. ‘No! Don’t touch me!’

‘Belle, Belle,’ he says, stumbling over the chains that drag on the floor as he inches towards her, the arm that touched her held protectively close, the other outstretched. ‘Belle, don’t move, you shouldn’t move, please don’t…'

She backs into a corner, and he can see her eyes pooling with tears. ‘Get away!’ Sinking to the floor, she curls up tight, sobbing, ‘just stay away, not again, please not again.’

Rumplestiltskin curses himself for the decades of imprisonment that have left him entirely unable to handle benign human contact. He is so utterly incompetent, and for a moment he hates himself even more before his attention is pulled back to Belle. 

Her hands cover her face and she rocks back and forth, moaning under her breath.

‘Belle,’ he whispers from a distance, thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to give her a bit of space. ‘Belle, please listen to me. No one is going to hurt you anymore. No one, no one. I won’t let them.’

She shakes, her whole body tremors with fear and she wails out loud. Rumplestiltskin frantically shifts back through what he said, searching for whatever he did wrong; he can’t find anything that is terrible in any way (but then again, he isn’t even human so how can he judge?).

‘What’s wrong?’ he says to her as gently as he can. ‘Can… can you hear me?’

She doesn’t respond, but stays locked in the same position, muscles so taut they could be the strings of an instrument.

He exhales softly, confused. What is happening? He tries to focus. There’s a darkness all around, and Bae’s voice cries with Belle’s words, ‘Don’t touch me!’. He shakes like the girl opposite him, wrapping his arms around his bruised, scarred chest in an attempt to block out the madness. Cora did this. Cora did everything.

At the back of his mind, madness is clawing its way in, scratching away the barriers, destroying them like crumbling stone walls. He knows the feeling well, he’s lived with it roaming his mind for years now. The need to forget, to hide behind thick curtains of madness. All the time the madness. With Belle, it lifted like a veil because he actually has a purpose, a thing to protect.

But now that he feels powerless and useless again in the face of her fear, it has come back.

‘No,’ he says desperately to himself. ‘No, no, no. Don’t let this happen, you can’t let this happen.’

He needs to do something to help Belle. Then the madness will go away and he will be able to think clearly again and he will know what to do.

She is bleeding again at the shoulder, dark blood seeping through the shirt’s fabric and darkening the red to more of a scarlet. Without thinking, he reaches forward to try and stem the flow.

Her reaction in instantaneous. She screams and lashes out, long sharp nails raking deep across his face.

‘Get away from me! Monster, you monster!’

Blood wells up in the scratches she has left on his face, and he feels like screaming too, feels like reaching forward to strangle her because she’s right, he’s a monster, he’s the Dark One, and he was not created to be kind to little girls who made the wrong deal. 

The darkness in him thinks that she should die, but he fights it, flinging it backwards into the dark shadows of his cage. He retreats back from Belle as fast as he possibly can with the chains digging into his ankles (he is afraid, perhaps of her, perhaps for her), and hides behind the spinning wheel, crouching on all fours. He is lost, too scared to approach her, too wise to touch her again. So he waits. 

She wakes screaming the word “monster” over and over again. As she becomes aware of what she is doing, her cries die into nothingness. Relaxes a tiny bit, and takes her hands away from her eyes.

The Dark One is watching her warily, blood dripping down his face. If it wasn’t a ridiculous idea, she’d say he looked… scared. Of her? Belle almost laughs, but doesn’t, because suddenly a wave of dizziness sweeps over her and she collapses backwards, leaning her pounding head against the cold stone wall. She can’t remember how she got here, but tears are leaking out of her eyes and from the look the Dark One is giving her such a look of indescribable horror that she knows she was shouting at him. And those scratches on his face… did he try and do something to her, while she slept? As he waits, poised on all fours, it is admittedly easy to think of him as a monster.

As if across a vast expanse of water, his voice drifts back through her memory. No one is going to hurt you anymore. The fear that has lain deep in his eyes since she first saw him intensifies as he studies her through the spinning wheel, through the spokes that might as well be bars of another cage. So far, she reminds herself, he has given her little reason to think of him as a monster. She cannot allow her frightened, paranoid state to misjudge him. 

‘Oh,’ she gasps, leaning against the wall, running her hands through her hair.

He darts forward for an instant, concern spreading across his bleeding face, but then catches himself and disappears back into the shadows. 

‘I…’ she says, acutely aware of her own shakiness, ‘I’ve made a horrible mistake, haven’t I?’ The drops of blood drip from his face and onto the floor like tears. He shakes his head fractionally, looking away from her into the darkness. 

Belle wonders who is the most afraid.

‘Dark One?’ She says. He frowns at the title, but she doesn’t have anything else to call him by. ‘Are you staying over there?’ she asks hesitantly. 

‘I don’t…’ he mutters, turning back towards her slightly. ‘I scare you already. I don’t want to scare you more.’ 

She looks at him like she’s never seen him before. ‘You do scare me,’ she says slowly. ‘But everything scares me.’ Her lips twitch slightly but she can’t seem to manage anything closer to a smile. ‘You just happen to be the closest scary thing around.’

He looks at her with eyes that are like the sun eclipsed; hope shining faintly behind great pools of darkness.

‘Please,’ she says, ‘Don’t stay there. In the darkness.’

Though he leans forward slightly, he makes no move to step towards her. The level of fear he seems to feel towards her is almost funny were it not so strange.

Clearly she has to make the first move. Feeling slightly guilty for deliberately forcing the situation, Belle levers herself up the wall to an extremely feeble standing position which lasts barely a second before she feels her legs give out. As she predicted, panic flashes over his features and he dashes forward, catching her. She giggles (actually giggles) when she sees his face; a mixture of annoyed and concerned.

‘You are diabolical’ he says and for a moment he is another person entirely, a playful cleverness glowing in his slight smileL 

‘I know,’ she grins.

Everything hurts and she’s bleeding again but she’d much rather have his company than awkwardly lie alone.

‘Can I… would you mind if I… carried you back to the straw?’ He asks. ‘I – I know it’s not much of a bed, but it’s better for your injuries than the stones.’ 

‘Of course.’ Belle says. ‘But only if you answer my question.’

He looks like a startled rabbit ready to bolt away and glances briefly down at the scars and bruises and whip wounds left on him, and she realises that he thinks she’s going to ask him something awfully personal. 

‘That would depend… that would depend on the question,’ he says.

‘Well,’ she ventures, ‘I was wondering why you speak with such long pauses.’ 

He sighs in relief. ‘I can try to stop if you want,’ he says apologetically.

‘Oh no, don’t you dare,’ she says. ‘I find it rather endearing.’ 

Though his answering smile is laced with suspicion, he looks on the verge of gratified, which makes Belle so ridiculously happy that she just has to smile back at him.

‘I suppose…’ he pauses again, grimaces. ‘I haven’t talked to anyone but Cora in decades. My conversational abilities are somewhat lacking. And I’m worried, worried that I’ll say the wrong thing and this will all shatter and turn out to be a dream.’ 

‘You think this is a dream?’

‘Maybe,’ he whispers. ‘Sometimes, when you sleep and I watch you, I know deep down that if you were real you wouldn’t be talking to me, you’d be running as far away as you could, you’d be treating me like the monster I am instead of like a… like a person. You are a light in the darkness of this place, and light is good. Nothing good ever happens here, so maybe it’s a dream.’ He gasps. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I… didn’t mean to insinuate that all the terrible things that have happened to you are good, I’m so-’

‘Shh,’ she says, because maybe his words should offend her, but instead she can only feel compassion for this desperately lonely person, and a vague sense of privilege that he considers her such a good thing when all she’s done is been a burden. ‘I’m not sorry you said that. And you’re not… not a monster. Not as far as I can tell.’

He laughs, but it turns into a sigh. ‘You must be blind, then. Look at me. If this wasn’t your only option, surely you wouldn’t be allowing me to touch you.’

She studies his face, and even if she tries, she can’t change her previous conclusion that it’s strange and slightly scary and sort of inhuman, but in no way disgusting. Reaching up a shaking hand, she takes one long strand of wild hair and brushes it behind his ear, letting her hand briefly skim across his scaly skin. He flinches at her touch, and his eyes (eyes unique to any she’s ever seen before) are fixed on hers, searching for something in their sapphire depths.  
‘If I wasn’t so injured,’ she says, ‘I’d want to look after you, because you’re injured too. And I don’t mind it – you touching me, I mean.’ 

His eyes follow hers down to the worst of the wounds, the Cat-‘o’-nine-tails marks brutally slashed across his shoulders and wings. For a moment, they stay there, him holding her with ease as though she were feather light. He moves his hand slightly, a hesitant motion, towards her hair, as though trying to copy her movements from before.

The clink of the chains on his wrist as his hand moves seems to snap him out of the spell, and he frowns and snatches his hand away, carrying her over to the bed of straw and laying her down like he can’t wait to let go of her. 

She looks back up at him as he stares at her warily, eyes narrowed in suspicion.  
‘You don’t believe me,’ she says softly. He dances backwards, hugging himself tight. One of his wings sweeps round, slowed by the weight of a night sky’s worth of silver shackles, and partly cloaks him from her. 

‘Why should I believe you?’ he says. ‘I believed her. She lied, she betrayed me.’ He keeps retreating, shaking like a leaf. ‘She betrayed me!’ he screams, and this time it is she who flinches away.

He laughs, an awful, high-pitched laugh that turns into a hysterical giggle. ‘Afraid, so afraid. Everyone afraid, everyone except her. She… she…’ 

‘Pet,’ a voice croons from the world beyond their cage and both Belle and the Dark One look round sharply. Cora leans on the bars, smirking at him, who shrinks backwards and holds his wing up like a shield. 

‘Come here,’ Cora says, and he sways on the spot like a drunk, managing to defy the command for a few meagre seconds before walking with detached, forced movements (like a puppet, Belle thinks) towards Cora, stopping a few centimetres away and glaring down at her.

‘Not good enough, pet,’ Cora says, and reaches through the bars, grabbing one of the chains attached to the smooth iron band around his neck and pulling, jerking him forward so that his face is pressed between the bars.

‘Better,’ she says, stroking his lips. He whimpers, a small choked sound cut short as Cora pulls harder on the chain. ‘Now, I’ve come to fulfil the terms of our deal. Take us somewhere… private. Unless, of course, you want to give the girl to me and we can have done with all this silliness.’ 

For an instant, Belle sees him looking at her out of the corner of his eye and her breath catches in her throat. There is a deep, primal fear lurking in the black irises, an anticipation. For a moment, she thinks he might agree to hand her over. Fear has drained the colour from her already pale-cheeks and what little energy she had is gone, leaving her with no way and no place to run. 

His gaze flickers back to Cora, and though the pressure of the band around his throat that Cora is pulling must make it difficult to breathe let alone move, he shakes his head. A tiny movement of defiance. 

Anger, frustration and pleasure curdle in Cora’s expression, an ugly mix. ‘The command still stands, then.’ She says, and the Dark One seems very small and scared for an instant before they both disappear. 

No cloud of purple smoke accompanies them. One moment they are there, and the next they are gone. 

Belle’s tears dampen the bone-dry straw that pricks her like the guilt piercing her heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Took a while getting this up *guilty face*.

**Author's Note:**

> *deep breath*. First fanfiction! Posting this scared the hell out of me.  
> This started out happy, honestly, and by the time I got to the end of the chapter it was this dark thing. I have no idea what happened.  
> 


End file.
